Charity Egg Sculpture Flies the Coop in Glasgow Public Art Theft

March 19, 2013

When the British charity Action for Children hatched the Scottish edition of its ongoing public art project the Big Egg Hunt by placing 100 artist-designed egg sculptures around Glasgow, it didn’t anticipate art thieves joining the hunt. And yet one of the fiberglass eggs, incubated by graphic designer Matthew Dent, titled “A Thousand Forests,” and said to be worth £10,000 ($15,100), was captured by uncharitable art thieves, BBC News reports.

This isn’t the first time one of the charity’s eggs has gone missing. Two of them were stolen during the project’s presentation in London last year, but both those egg theft cases were cracked, and the sculptures were returned when the thieves chickened out. Dent’s egg, which features organic, leaf-shaped patterns in red and yellow, was taken from Glasgow’s Buchanan Street early Friday morning before the rooster’s crow.

The egg exhibition, which includes pieces by artists Billy Childish, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and Annie Kevans, is due back in Covent Gardens for Easter, but Action for Children officials are hopeful the missing egg will be returned before then. Let’s hope the detective on the case is hard-boiled.